


pour a little salt, we were never here

by forcynics



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-26 06:43:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/279936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forcynics/pseuds/forcynics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Damon and Elena attempt to exist in the aftermath of Stefan's departure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pour a little salt, we were never here

**Author's Note:**

  * For [waltzmatildah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/gifts).



  
Damon will admit that at first, Elena goes through a sort of denial. But what follows is nowhere near as simple as any five-step walkthrough would lead you to believe.  
   
He's grieved and seen grief around him for a century and a half, and frankly, he's never really bought into that psychiatrist shit.  
   
   
   
   
   
“We can find him.” She repeats it like a mantra, always so earnest, and he knows that she actually _means_ it, actually thinks they can and then everything will be okay—which just makes it worse. How is he supposed to tell her that it’s not a question of _if_ they can find Stefan, it’s a question of _what_ they’ll find when they do?  
   
He nods instead, forces a smile.  
   
“Of course we can, Elena. Leave it to me.”  
   
She doesn’t. _Of course._  
   
   
   
   
   
Elena takes to sleeping into Stefan’s bedroom, after late night sessions planning and re-planning as if they actually have any information to go off of. Countless hypothetical situations are assessed, and with each one she gets visibly more frustrated, points out that they should be actually _doing_ something.  
   
So he finally shows her the newspaper clipping: _Husband and wife mauled to death by grizzly._  
   
“Raleigh,” she says. “Klaus is in North Carolina, and Stefan must be with him...”  
   
The alternative thought in her mind must be that Stefan is already dead. Damon deliberates whether to point out how the article describes the bodies ripped into pieces, explain what that means. It’s a toss-up, and for once he actually opts for silence.  
   
Elena sleeps in Stefan’s bedroom that night, and he wonders if she pretends that nothing’s gone wrong when she’s closing her eyes.  
   
She hasn’t been in his bedroom since the kiss they both resolutely Do Not Talk About.  
   
   
   
   
   
They go to Raleigh. They’re supposed to be a team, so he takes her with him. She has a picture of Stefan and she waves it around, asking if anyone’s seen him recently.  
   
A middle-aged man confirms that he did, only two days past, and Elena lights up when she hears, having finally found reason on which to support her hope. Damon smiles too, like he’s just as relieved, like he wasn’t already positive his brother was still alive, like he hadn’t been thinking, _You know, the one who_ actually _mauled the couple out on the trail, who tore their bodies into bits and pieces_? every time Elena had held up the picture and asked “Have you seen this man?”  
   
   
   
   
   
They hit a dead end after that, and Damon can tell by the way Elena bites her lip constantly and throws herself into researching that she’s disappointed, that she wasn’t expecting this, that she’d probably pictured some treasure hunt of clues that would lead straight to Stefan if they could just crack them.  
   
She does come into his bedroom one day, breathless and flushed, holding up a newspaper triumphantly.  
   
“ _Four teenagers found dead in their apartment,”_ she reads quickly, the words rushing together. “ _Bodies mangled beyond recognition... appear to be drained of blood—”_ She’s tripping over her words in excitement, and then she stops, paling as it hits her: just what she’s reading, what she’s so _excited_ about.  
   
There’s a wrecked look that flashes over her eyes, _horror_ with herself, and Damon wants to say that he knows what it’s like, to realize suddenly how far past the line you’ve gone without even noticing, but instead he nods.  
   
“Sounds like our boy Klaus,” he agrees, his voice as joking as ever. He touches her arm lightly, though, and when she doesn’t flinch or move, he keeps it there.  
   
   
   
   
   
They don’t have the same luck in the next town. They arrive, Elena flashes the picture, Damon compels people to tell them the truth, but it doesn’t matter because no one remembers seeing Stefan.  
   
The drive back to Mystic Falls is so quiet Damon could have left Elena behind and it wouldn’t have made a difference. He almost feels like he did—or maybe he left himself. Maybe that’s it, maybe he’s not really here at all. He doesn’t know which would be better.  
   
 _Fuck, Stefan,_ he thinks. Because really, he’s as trapped as Tantalus—what he most desperately wants right within his reach but impossible to grasp. Stefan’s gone, he and Elena are here. But Elena remains as far out of reach as ever, almost as far away as Stefan.  
   
Which really just leaves him.  
   
   
   
   
   
Elena’s sleeping at her own house again. Ric’s there too, Damon remembers, and he finds the guy at the bar one afternoon—no surprise there.  
   
A dozen casual conversation starters race through his mind, lines used a million times over, but he discards them all and settles for a simple. “How is she?”  
   
Ric drains the dredges of his whiskey before meeting Damon’s stare.  
   
“She’s okay,” Ric finally says, but Damon can’t help thinking he’s probably not the best judge of ‘okay’ right now.  
   
He pats the guy on the back once before he leaves.  
   
   
   
   
   
The next time he gets a lead, Damon takes Andie with him and doesn’t tell Elena. It’s probably nothing and it wouldn’t be fair to her, not when she still hasn’t learned how to keep her hopes down.  
   
As for himself, he’s not surprised when it’s another dead end. Logically, at least. In reality, he could work on keeping his hopes down too.  
   
“Why didn’t you bring Elena?” Andie asks, and he compels her to not mention it to anyone and doesn’t answer her question. She smiles at him then, with wide, open eyes, and Damon sends her home when they get back in town.  
   
He feels disgusted – with Andie’s trusting eyes, with dead end after dead end – and even eight glasses of bourbon can’t chase it away.  
   
   
   
   
   
“Have you found anything else?” Elena asks him one night, a week later.  
   
“Nope,” he lies.  
   
“Oh.” She’s just standing there in the hallway. “Me neither,” she adds, and he doesn’t bother to tell her that those two words were unnecessary.  
   
She goes into Stefan’s room and shuts the door behind her and when she emerges later, Damon wishes her good night and pretends he couldn’t just hear her crying.  
   
She seems grateful, or maybe that’s just what he tells himself.  
   
   
   
   
   
Caroline corners him near the end of summer.  
   
“Look, there has to be _something_ I can do to help,” she insists, tapping her foot.  
   
He snorts. “Doesn’t matter. Stefan’s not coming back.”  
   
“Elena doesn’t seem to think so.” He doesn’t need to see Caroline’s frown; he can hear it in her tone.  
   
Damon still doesn’t lift his head.  
   
“Yeah, well don’t tell her I said that.”  
   
   
   
   
   
The next time he sees the blonde, she’s suggesting a party. A birthday party.  
   
“I just think it’d be good for her. She could use something to make her smile again.”  
   
And he doesn’t know when he started caving in so easily, but he decides that if Caroline’s telling the truth and a party just might make Elena smile again then he’s in.  
   
He doesn’t know _when_ , but he does know _why,_ and he knows that even if Stefan isn’t here he’s still just as fucked as ever.  
   
   
   
   
   
She looks soft, standing there in the white dress. Not _breakable_ , like she’s looked all summer, merely soft. It’s an improvement, slowly.  
   
Immortality means having all the time in the world, but as Damon clasps the necklace around her neck and leads her downstairs, he thinks it might be more useful to just stop time. He wants to hold onto this, Elena’s hand light on his arm, the small curve of her lips when he presented her with the necklace—it’s all going to return to messy and fucked up soon enough, everything does.  
   
All he wants is to pretend for one second that they aren’t existing indefinitely, only under the shadow of Stefan and Klaus.  
   
All he wants is to believe that it won’t just disappear on him, but then in true fashion, life has to turn around and kick him down right away.  
   
   
   
   
   
He’s not expecting to find Elena in his bedroom when he ducks inside, but she’s standing there, furiously red in the face and clutching the newspaper clippings he’d stopped showing her.  
   
“There were more,” she says quietly, and somehow it’s worse that she sounds more _confused_ than hurt.  
   
“You didn’t show me,” she says, when he still hasn’t spoken, and then, striding forward to shove them into his chest, “ _Why didn’t you show me, Damon?”_  
   
And he knew all along that it would eventually come down to this, but it’s still hard to find to the words to tell her that he simply didn’t have the heart to break hers.  
   
   
   
   
   
He gets the feeling that she would ignore him for a while if she didn’t think they stood a better chance of finding Stefan together. She shows up at the boardinghouse like she used to, with newspapers in hand like so many other mornings, and she sits down at the table and starts to sift through them.  
   
Okay, so maybe she’s kind of ignoring him. But she’s _here_ all the same, that’s the important thing. He really doesn’t need to be tracking down two runaways right now.  
   
“I’m _sorry_ , Elena,” he calls loudly from the kitchen.  
   
She doesn’t look up when he goes back into the sitting room, but she does respond. “We’re going to find him,” she says, insistent as always, almost enough to make it feel like it’s the beginning of summer again and Stefan only disappeared yesterday. Almost enough to make him believe her.  
   
“We’re going to do it together, Damon,” she continues. “And you’re not going to lie to me.”  
   
She looks up at him, her expression stony even as he joins her on the couch. She doesn’t move.  
   
“You don’t hide anything from me,” she says. “You tell me everything, you don’t—you don’t try and _protect_ me,” she chokes out, and it irritates him how much she hates that word, that concept.  
   
He reaches up and strokes his fingers over her cheek, brushing stray hair back, and only then does she flinch, the cold expression faltering for a moment.  
   
“Damon...”  
   
“I swear,” he says finally, his voice low. “We’ll do it together.”  
   
A second passes, and then she nods.  
   
   
   
   
   
Over the next week, they pinpoint four cities Klaus and Stefan have possibly visited, try and see if there’s any link or any clear trail. If there is, they can’t find it. They’re two steps behind and they need to get a step ahead, he’s just not sure _how._  
   
Elena falls asleep on the couch on a Wednesday night, and Damon starts to pull a blanket over her but then she wakes up, with the startled eyes of someone confused by their surroundings. It only takes a second before she relaxes, rubbing her face as she sits up.  
   
“Are we ever going to find him, Damon?” she asks sleepily, in the same tone she might ask for the time.  
   
“Yes,” he tells her, more because he wants to believe it than because he actually does.  
   
“Don’t lie to me.” It’s a whisper.  
   
“Okay.” He swallows. “I don’t know, Elena. I don’t have a clue.”  
   
She stares at him for a long moment, before posing another question, softly. “What happens when we do?”  
   
And the answer should be that everything goes back to normal, that Stefan and Elena eventually get their happily ever after, that it means they’ve accomplished their mission. But Damon doesn’t say any of that.  
   
“I don’t know,” he admits instead, and thinks that at least he’s not lying.  
   
   
   
   
   
He finds her looking at a photograph in her room when he goes to her house.  
   
 _I know where Klaus and Stefan are right now_ —those should be the first words out of his mouth, but instead he asks “What’s that?”  
   
It’s her and Stefan, from the beginning of last year, smiling goofy smiles at the camera and looking sickeningly happy together. _In love_ , Damon thinks, and then he says it: “I know where Klaus and Stefan are right now.”  
   
Elena all but jumps up from her bed, with a quick “Let’s go.” She doesn’t even ask where.  
   
But she does stop in front of him. He’s in her way, but she could duck around him easily. Instead, she swallows, and reaches up, fingers brushing his forehead lightly.  
   
“Thank you, Damon,” she says, leaning into him for a moment, and even though he craves this, he doesn’t actually know what to do. He _can’t_ do what he wants to do, so he just kisses the top of her head, lightly breathing in, slowly.  
   
She steps back, and she’s looking at him as if he’s supposed to answer a question, as if she’s asking him if he’s lying to her again. And maybe he is, if that counts, doing something which isn’t what you actually find yourself wanting to do in a given moment, the body betraying the mind.  
   
But all Damon does is offer a light grin, and repeat her own words back at her, “Let’s go, Elena,” and then they do.  
   
   
   
   
   
He does end up wondering whether it is better to have wanted something impossibly out of reach than to have never known that something or what it was to want it, as they drive down the highway on their way to Stefan.  
   
He never decides on an answer.

  



End file.
